With the rapid development of wireless communication applications, terminals have become an indispensable tool in people's daily life, and the requirements for the appearances of the terminals also become increasingly high. A service provider (SP) hopes to provide appearance packages in various styles for users, so that the users are enabled to display personalized terminal appearance. A terminal appearance refers to contents presented by a terminal to the users such as background, ringing tone, and menu, which are individually referred to as appearance elements. When a plurality of appearance elements is provided to the terminal or operated through the terminal, a collection of the elements is referred to as an appearance package.
Meanwhile, the SP hopes to manage the appearance packages on terminals over network, so as to ensure the benefits of the users and the SP. Management operations of an appearance package on a terminal include delivery, installation, activation/deactivation, update, deletion, and locking/unlocking of the appearance package. Specifically, the delivery operation means sending the appearance package; the installation operation means that the terminal installs the received appearance package, so as to generate a new appearance package; the activation operation means enabling a particular appearance package to become an appearance package currently used by the terminal; the update operation means updating contents in the received appearance package to the existing appearance package; the deletion operation means deleting the particular appearance package stored by the terminal; and the locking/unlocking operation means locking the appearance package against modification, and releasing the locked appearance package.
When the appearance customization service of the user is provided by one SP, the SP can assign serial numbers to the appearance packages in a unified manner, so that no conflict occurs when a server initiates operations on the appearance packages. However, if the appearance customization service of the user is provided by a plurality of SPs, and identical contents may be repeatedly provided, conflicts may occur when the appearance packages are operated. For example, an SP1 initiates an operation to delete an appearance package, and the terminal performs the operation but deletes an appearance package provided by an SP2, resulting in poor appearance management.
In order to solve the problem, the server needs to confirm the appearance packages with the terminal before initiating the operations. In the prior art, a method for managing terminal appearance based on operation/management/authorization-device management (OMA-DM) is provided. In the method, a server based on the OMA-DM technology serves as a manager, and sends a command for operating a certain appearance package, and a client based on the OMA-DM technology executes the command. In the method, the identification of the appearance package is implemented by the terminal. Each time when the server delivers a new appearance package, the terminal assigns a serial number to the appearance package, and returns the serial number to the server, and the server records the serial number; when the server needs to operate the appearance package, the server delivers the serial number of the appearance package along with the command, so that the terminal can correctly operate the appearance package.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor found that the prior art at least has the following problems.
The OMA-DM is merely an optional technical solution for appearance management, and in most cases, appearance management is not based on the OMA-DM technology, so that the server cannot record the serial number of each appearance package for each terminal, which is also not feasible in the DM mode, but instead, the server generally obtains a serial number of a target appearance package by query. As a result, a lot of resources are consumed by the server in obtaining information about the appearance package of the terminal.